Cesar Aira - The Seamstress and the Wind

Now I remember a type of candy that the children of Pringles adored in those days, a kind of ancestor of what afterwards became gum. It was very local, I don’t know who invented it nor when it disappeared, I only know that today it does not exist. It was a little ball wrapped in parchment paper, accompanied by a little loose stick, all very homemade. One had to chew it until it got spongy and grew enormously in volume; we knew it was ready when it no longer fit in our mouths. We’d take it out, and it would have transformed into an extremely light mass that had the property of changing shape when blown by the wind, to which we exposed it by putting it on the end of the little stick. That must be why it was only a local candy: the winds of Pringles are like knives. It was like having a portable cloud, and seeing it change and suggest all kinds of things. . It was healthy and entertaining. . The wind, which left us as we were (it limited itself to mussing our hair) ceaselessly transfigured the mass. . and there was no point falling in love with a particular shape because it would already be another, then another. . until suddenly it would solidify, or crystallize, into any one of the shapes that had been delighting us for so many minutes, and then we would eat it like a lollipop.

I said before, I think, that when it snowed at night Chiquito would come by at dawn and leave me, as a present for when I left for school, a snowman in the doorway of my house. For me, as for Omar, both of us ignorant of his secret life, Chiquito was a hero, with his truck as big as a mountain and his journeys across all of marvelous Argentina. . The neighbors praised his heart, his slightly childish gesture — which did more justice to his name than to his herculean physique — for building a snowman at those impossible hours when he always set out, just to give me a fleeting surprise, a little pleasure. Sometimes, when I went out on those occasions, the wind had already started to blow, and my snowman received me with eight arms, or a humpback, or more often with a Picassoesque twist, the nose at the nape of the neck, the navel on the back, both shoulders on the same side. . On my return at noon nothing would be left: it always melted.

But there was one snowman, (two or three winters before the summer in which the action of this novel takes place) that didn’t melt. When I came outside I was taken aback. No one had told me it had snowed. It was still dark, but I could see well enough; in front of me there was a snowman, three and a half feet high, that originally, when Chiquito stopped by to make it before he left, would have been one of those friendly squat dwarfs that snowmen always are. But in the meantime the snow had stopped falling, the wind had begun to blow, and the snowman had been modified on all four sides. This didn’t frighten me; on the contrary, I was so delighted I burst out laughing. . The fact that the snowman would melt within a few hours didn’t worry me either. . but it did worry him.

“When the sun comes out,” he said, “and it won’t be long, I will turn to water and the earth will swallow me.”

“When someone puts their foot in it they often say ‘May the earth swallow me up,’” I said. Even as a boy I was very pedantic and a know-it-all.

“But I’m not saying that! I don’t want to die.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t help him, but then to my surprise the wind spoke:

“That can be arranged.”

The Snowman: “How?”

“You will have to accept my terms.”

“And I’m not going to die?”

“Never.”

“Then I accept, whatever it is!”

There I intervened, unable to stay at the fringes of any conversation:

“Be careful, this looks like one of those soul-selling deals the devil does, for example in. .” I started telling them, with a wealth of detail, the plot of The Man Who Sold His Shadow , which I’d already read (as an eight-year-old! How insufferable I must have been!). But the snowman interrupted me:

“And if I don’t have a soul, snotface?” And to the wind: “What are the conditions?”

“Only one: that you let me carry you to Patagonia, where the sun does not melt the snow, and you let yourself be molded forever, every instant, by the winds. You will live forever, but you will never have the same shape twice.”

“What a deal! Since you’ve already changed my shape anyway. .”

“But listen, there we blow a thousand times harder than here.”

“Don’t exaggerate. What do I care, anyway? It’s a deal, let’s go.”

I had nothing to say (and they wouldn’t have paid me any attention anyway) since the whole business seemed pretty reasonable to me. . But didn’t it always seem reasonable in these cases? Wasn’t that the devil’s best trick? Except in this case, since it was a snowman, it really did seem reasonable, no hidden trap. And yet. .

I watched as the wind lifted the snowman with a whirling “Ups-a-daisy!” and carried him away through the gray light of dawn.

I NEVER KNEW what I did that lost afternoon. .

In loss everything comes together. Loss is all-devouring. A person can lose an umbrella, a piece of paper, a diamond, a bit of lint. . It’s all metabolized. To lose is to forget things in cafés. Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything into the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. I seek it, to oblivion, in the insanity of art. I pursue forgetting as well-earned pay for my fatigue and my memories. . What good is working? I’d rather be finished already. One more effort. . I would like all the scattered elements of the fable to come together at the end in one supreme moment. Except maybe I don’t have to work to pull it off, in which case my efforts would be unnecessary. Or at least. . I should have thought it through better. . Instead of sitting down to write. . about the seamstress and the wind. . with that idea of adventure, of successiveness. . I’m not saying, Renounce the successiveness that makes the adventure. . but rather to imagine beforehand all the successive events, until I had the whole novel in my head, and only then. . or not even then. . The whole project like a single point, the Aleph, the monad totally unfolded but as a point, an instant. . My life set in the present with everything that has happened in it, which isn’t much, which is hardly anything. Wasting time in cafés. I never found out what I did that lost afternoon. .

En fin . Now that I’m here, let’s finish.

I’d left Delia in the twilight, lost and waiting. The wind came back with a small, perfectly gray thing.

“I didn’t find the dress or the sewing kit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you wanted them for anyway.”

“And this?”

“It’s the only thing I found. Is it yours?”

“Yes. . It was mine. .”

It was her silver thimble, a precious souvenir, in whose little hollow Delia thought her whole life might fit, her whole life since she was born. And now that it looked like her life was coming to an end, or that it was slipping into an unintelligible abyss, she saw it had been worth the trouble to live it, there in Pringles.

“It’s not just a common thimble,” said the wind. “I’ve transmuted it into a Patagonian Thimble. You’ll be able to pull anything you want out of it, whatever your desire tells you, whatever size it might be. All you’ll have to do is rub it until it shines every time you ask for something, and I’ll take care of that, I’m very good at rubbing.”

Delia was about to answer him, because she’d finally found a good response, when she heard a distant sound and looked up.

There were people coming, from all four sides. Miniatures. Distant things have been made small. The function of truly large places, and Patagonia is the largest of them all, is to allow things to become truly small. They were toys. Four of them, and they came from the four cardinal directions, in a perfect cross whose center was Delia. Chiquito’s truck, the Paleomobile, the Monster, and the Snowman arm in arm with the empty Wedding Dress. These last two came with little measured steps, like a bride and groom bound for the altar. But the speed of all four was the same, and it was obvious that in the end there would be a collision on the spot where Delia stood. She tried taking a step to the side, and the four right angles moved with her. The encounter would be simultaneous. (I could never have thought of such an appropriate image of the instant as catastrophe.) There was nothing to do. She closed her eyes.